Random thoughts, rants and raves – most of them contradictory

Archive for the ‘coronation street’ Category

I’m getting a little tired of the young.All I ever see on TV are actors young enough to be my kids – ditto with movies.Well it’s not so much their ages as it is that all of them are slim, toned, and stunningly beautiful with improbably straight white teeth, perky tits andperma-tans.Victoria Beckham comes to mind although *her* tits are most definitely 90% silicon [oops – should insert the word ‘alleged’ there since she’s in the habit of suing people but since I’m skint I doubt that she’ll get much change outta me].OH COME ON! As Gordon Ramsay might shout – you can’t weigh little more than a half-starved hamster and have *any* tits let alone perfectly round ones that stick up all by themselves.Speaking as someone who has been sadly and unfairly affected by gravity I know!

This is why I prefer Brit TV over the American shite that we are served up on a daily basis here.We don’t have shows of our own you see – all Canadian productions, at least on TV, are low-budget affairs which are usually set in fishing villages in BC with a few grizzly bears , an evil logging conglomerate and Ann Heche.The irony of course is that many Hollywood productions are shot in either Vancouver or Toronto and in fact Toronto is known as Hollywood North.We’re cheaper [not to mention cleaner] you see and we have lots of tall buildings that can stand in for the New York Skyline.Staying in downtown Toronto is like visiting the set of Diehard 17 – in fact it probably *is* the set of Diehard 17, complete with car chases, explosions and dare-devil feats involving airplanes [Lester B Pearson International is just around the corner].We have large tracts of green areas [Central Park], a big lake and an island [Manhattan] and some impressive early colonial architecture complete with Doric columns [New York Public Library, Supreme Court] and even an ivy covered university [Yale and Harvard].

But I got sidetracked as usual – what was I talking about again?Oh yes – the Young and the Beautiful [could be a soap opera but I think it’s been done already].As I was saying before I so rudely interrupted myself, everyone I see on TV is just too flawless for words.They must breed them in a lab somewhere. I often get the urge to mash muffins in their perfectly made-up non-wrinkled faces, especially just after I’ve been running [walking] on the treadmill of a morning and caught a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror, bright red face, last night’s make-up that I forgot to take off still smeared all over [bugger that means an image of my face is going be indelibly etched into the pillows again] and hair plastered flat and glistening like some dreadful B-list movie star of the fifties.

Now give me Coronation Street over CSI any day.Corrie is about the only show that anyone watches on CBC unless you’re into endless re-runs of Anne of Green Gables that is [I saw her once on stage at Stratford – not the character – the actress, starring in an otherwise magnificent production of Amadeus.She was crap].Corrie characters are ‘real’ – some of them, in fact many of them, are actually over the age of 25 [gasp] and they have – wait for it – wrinkles, and sagging tits [Deirdre really should wear a bra] even white hair, and in Ken’s case, a paunch.We have our affectionate names for them – Deirdre the Neck, Gale the Turtle, Ken the Boring, Tracey the Slag.Watch the show and you’ll see why.But my point is these characters are portrayed at least as real people – they have warts, they dress badly, their teeth are crooked,they smoke incessantly, and there does not appear to be a Mercedes or a mansion among them.That’s another thing – how come all American TV stars are barely out of their teens but live in vastly spacious apartments in Manhattan, mansions in Malibu, or on ranches withseven hundred acres complete with race horses?Can’t see Vera Duckworth or Jack or Tyrone having to do with any of that, can you?